Emaily 0.7.1: Simplified email delivery, more stability (#emaily #googlewave)

Emaily 0.7 was announced last week, and it turned out that there are some cases where it still does not behave the way like it should. Today I'm happy to announce the fruits of some hard fixing and planning work, Emaily 0.7.1. The changes are the following:

Incoming emails are not distributed

In earlier versions, when a wave received a reply from an email user, and it has more than one email users and the incoming email did not have all email recipients listed in Cc: or the To: fields, then Emaily decided to deliver the email to the missing recipients. This was intended to be a feature, but it is very annoying in some cases, so we decided to disable the incoming email-distribution entirely. If a reply comes to a wave from email, it is not sent to any other email recipient (unless it is edited by a wave participant, in that case, it behaves like a new and edited blip).

This is not a problem if the communication is between one wave user and one email user, and less disturbing in some cases when there are more email users, especially when one participant is a mailing list.

Emails are sent out to every participant at once

Previously we sent out emails to each recipient separately, so that email participants did not see the participants of the conversation. The spirit of the wave is that every participant is visible for the others, so now we've changed this behavior. Every outgoing email now has all email and wave participants in their To: field.

An advantage of this is that combined with the previous feature is that if email participants use the "reply all" feature of their email client, then everyone will get every part of the conversation in a multi-participant conversation without the need of control from Emaily.

Manual send is disabled

Manual send will require some rework, and is more confusing than helpful, so we removed it temporarily. Now every message you finish in a wave will get delivered automatically after about 30 seconds.

Redirecting emails, mailing lists

With these changes, it is now safe to redirect your emails to wave: you don't need to worry that your nice wave robot sends out emails when you did not want to.

You can even subscribe to a mailing list with your emaily email address. If some other Emaily user is a member of the same mailing list, then you'll have a common wave created from the emails coming from the mailing list, so you can even discuss things faster (realtime), than members of the mailing list.

Enjoy the newest version of Emaily!